Stations on planet Earth have sent and received messages beamed via laser from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft over 350 million kilometers (218 million miles) away. This breakthrough in optical communication shows that NASA is laying the groundwork for high-speed data links for future human missions to Mars. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology has recently demonstrated that data encoded in lasers can be sent, received, and decoded after traveling hundreds of millions of kilometers across the Solar System.

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, the Psyche spacecraft was launched in 2023 with the mission of orbiting and studying the metallic as

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